Peter Wurman
Peter Wurman is an American computer scientist who co-founded Kiva Systems and served as its chief technology officer, designing the software that coordinated its warehouse robots.
What they did and why it matters
Wurman built the decision-making software that told Kiva's robots which shelf to fetch and where to go, which made large fleets of mobile robots practical in a working fulfillment center. A former North Carolina State professor working on multi-agent systems, he joined his MIT roommate Mick Mountz to found Kiva, which Amazon acquired in 2012. The same kinds of algorithms, assigning tasks, routing robots, and placing fast movers closer to stations, run inside today's autonomous mobile robot and goods-to-person systems. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the work.